Becoming Emotionally Mature (Part One)

Would you believe this is my 90th mental well-being blog? Our tool kit for staying afloat and mentally healthy is ever expanding.

This week I’m focusing on the skills of emotional maturity. For a long time on my own path of healing, I was never sure what this actually meant. Now there’s an astonishing admission!

So let’s explore what this term means to me today. It’s certainly not about the external signs that our society uses to measure success, like wealth, career position, or family.

For me it’s more about the internal factors of my being. How self-aware I am. How compassionate I am. How accepting I am of what is happening in my life each day – rather than how I would desire things to be. How willing I become to accept responsibility for my actions and reactions.

There are many aspects that contribute to becoming an emotionally mature person. It’s a big topic and I’m going to spread this out into next week’s blog as there is so much to cover. As I reflect on this area, I realise it’s like a big melting pot of all the topics I’ve written about in detail in other blogs.

Emotional maturity requires developing a balance. We do our best to stay centred and not lean too far one way or the other. As Cynthia Orange says in her meaningful pamphlet on this subject, a compassionate and responsible person will be aware of their own needs whilst taking notice and understanding the needs of others.

This means that we can say ‘No’ to others without feeling selfish. We do not allow ourselves to be weighed down or controlled by the ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ of life that do not serve our well-being. This way we can maintain our own serenity.

The Serenity prayer is crucial in our becoming emotionally mature people:

‘Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.’

We have to let go of the idea that we can control situations by controlling others. Instead, we learn how to adapt to all the challenges and changes we experience.

Staying aware and awake in life is a key factor. I can often lose precious moments of my day by being completely unaware of what I am doing. Have you ever driven a car on autopilot? Well – it’s a bit like that. You arrive somewhere and are not really sure how you reached that destination point.

This usually happens when I’m ruminating on something that happened in the past and my mind becomes controlled by different impulses. Shame, guilt, anger, fear. What I did in that situation and what I should have done. What did she really mean when she said that? A whole load of baggage that drags my mind away from the here and now. From this moment.

What develops my emotional maturity is when I can say ‘Stop.’ And snap out of my inner obsessions. I can accept that my mind is in turmoil and instead become an observer of that – I do not have to act upon these different impulses. I name what is happening – I am compulsively distracted. This is how things are right now. I settle my mind by bringing it back to the present moment.

Getting rid of toxic things in our life is an essential part of our healing process. We cannot expect to develop a sense of healthy maturity, if we keep on doing what we’ve always done and expect a different, more positive result.

Whatever is unhelpful to our well-being needs to be removed. Only you will know what comes under this heading ‘toxic.’  For me it was alcohol and ever-increasing debt. That’s why today I choose to stay sober and solvent. Ask yourself the question – are you ready to go to any lengths to heal and stay well?

We need to be prepared to discover what is damaging to our mental health and replace this with that which is nourishing. We do this by honouring our sensitivity and well-being. 

Our aim is to acquire the skills of emotional maturity and develop the wisdom to put them into practice.

There are several other aspects to this quest in becoming emotionally mature and I’ll  cover these in next week’s blog.

Author of memoir – ‘Wearing Red, One Woman’s Journey to Sanity’

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